User blog:Ixsc15/Welcome 2017! - (01.02.2017)
Welcome all! The new year kicked in and so did the wiki become one year older. I am gonna talk about the future of the wiki and some opinions/explanations of the silent 2016 (this is a blog post, after all? :D). Low productivity in 2016 The previous year saw little increment or additions on the wiki. There is two topics I would like to discuss: personal effects and the evolution of the Stronghold franchise. Personal I am undergoing a weird maturing throughout my life, which is obviously normal in everyone's life. However, I got really carried away with vision and motives - the persistent pursuit after joy and good feelings have slowly taken over my rational mind. As a result, I slowly turned away from tasks and duties that I could not find the success or joy within anymore: managing this wiki also falls under this case. Only recently could I find that there is still room to change my perspectives and continue my roots, what I cared about previously and what I find true joy within. Being a bureucrat on a low-activity page like this shouldn't be a hard task: you check back every now and then, see if changes were made and do the occasional cleanup, grammar corrections and talks - usual everyday stuff. But when you don't even want to do these checkbacks, is when you realize that something is not right even a bit. When the New Year of 2016 has come, I was full of plans of revamping the page: doing Crusader 2 blog posts, step up the discussion, make the community more open. There have been lots of passive editors on the wiki, so there is definitely some fertile land to grow upon, but I was miserable and careless not to take advantage of this fact. As a result, the wiki has seen little improvements and everything was left in a half-ready state - Crusader 2 characters, content and other stuff have been still missing pictures or entire pages just for basic wiki functions. Firefly's progression On the other hand, Firefly barely enriched their latest game or anything in the Stronghold series. In 2016, there were no expansions, downloadable content or anything for SHC2, only bugfixes and other minor patches. This might be because Firefly works very hard to incorporate their games with Steam (a bit late for this though), with Stronghold Legends already having done and Stronghold 2 to follow. Firefly also stated that after porting the old games, they are going to turn their attention to the next Stronghold game. A bit on the funny side though: Firefly made an experimental project called Wonky Tower, which is Firefly's first smartphone game featuring a monkey building collapsible towers out of various materials. The game features numerous recurring Stronghold SFX which is really funny imo :) but this game won't be / hasn't been an obvious bestseller. I never tried it out, though. To a better 2017! What could I do in 2016? Well, I can grab my thrown away plans from 2016 and forge new ones! On a serious note, though: here are the plans I have in mind for the wiki: #Carrying on cleanups and corrections on pages. Most of the text has weird or unsuitable choices of grammar, so these obviously need to be redone. This will be performed on a daily basis. #Simplifying appearance and unifying page format. This is a task I (and possibly others) long for for quite a long time. Almost all unit, building and other contextual pages have different topics, headers and disorganized content. I might need someone else's help to accelerate the process, but this is the most important task since the wiki guidelines also follow basic editing, and so does the community. #Changing the main page. The main page is still acceptable with the slider and the news, but some layout changes are needed. I am going to look up and take up some basic webpage design on the Internet, but additional help from an outsider is very welcome. Fancy effects like adaptive background or other stuff is also useful. This is a long-term task that is most likely to be done in baby steps. #Opening up communication. Since I am the most active member with both administrator privileges and extensive editing, I will definitely need new admins or helpers to keep things under control. Also, the Stronghold franchise is far from dying so we could keep a small community up and running (like Heavengames or Stronghold Nations). I am unsure where to start, but contacting these sites might open up new opportunities. Last but not least, I will try to work on the walkthroughs in each game (outside of Stronghold 3 which I don't own). Since the Stronghold 2 war campaign was considerably successful I did back then (the playlist), netting me thousands of views, I am also planning the upload of skirmish trails on Youtube. These will be included on my profile and their respective references on the walkthrough pages when done. Hopefully you enjoyed this "small" bit of update from your bureucrat! See you in the Inn! Ixsc15(talk) 23:22, January 2, 2017 (UTC) Category:Blog posts